Emmanuel Levinas was
born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1906. His parents were Jewish, and in
his youth, Levinas read the Bible in Hebrew. Russian was the language
of his early education, though he was also fluent in German. His
studies in philosophy began in 1923 in Strasbourg, where he met
Charles Blondel, and his life-long companion Maurice Blanchot.
Levinas attended Husserl's final lectures of 1928-9, and became
influenced by Husserl's Logical Investigations, though he quickly
became a follower of Heidegger's Being and Time, which was to have a
profound effect on his thinking. Both Husserl and Heidegger can be
seen to have influenced Levinas' first three major publications:
Theorie de l'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl (The Theory
of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology 1930), Existence and
Existents (1947), and En Découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et
Heidegger (1949). Furthermore, Levinas became influential in France
for his translations of Husserl and Heidegger into French.
Levinas' later
philosophy is directly related to his experiences during World War
II. In 1939, he served as an officer in the French army, working as
an interpreter of Russian and German. In 1940 he became a prisoner of
war, and due to his officer status he was sent to a military
prisoners' camp where he was put into forced labor. His wife and
daughter managed to be kept hidden in a French monastery until his
return, but the rest of his family were killed. This experience,
coupled with Heidegger's affiliation to National Socialism during the
war, led to a profound crisis in Levinas' enthusiasm for Heidegger.
If it can be said that Heidegger is concerned with Being, Levinas
positioned his concerns with ethics; for Levinas, ethics is beyond
being — otherwise than Being.
Levinas found
himself in a difficult context for his ideas around ethics in the
1930's and 40's, for Marxism, structuralism and in the early
fifities, the beginnings of post-structuralism made it an unfavorable
situation for Levinas to present his anti-universalist,
anti-foundationalist and non-prescriptive ethics derived from a
respect and responsibility for the Other. At this time it was the
help of his close allies, Blanchot and Derrida, that kept him in the
realm of serious discourse.
Levinas' career
after his confinement during the war was spent at the Alliance
Israelite Universelle, where he was appointed the Director. The
postwar years were marked by his meeting with the Talmudic scholar,
Monsieur Chouchani, with whom Levinas studied. These studies resulted
in a series of five volumes of Talmudic readings. The last of these
readings, Nouvelles Lectures Talmudiques, appeared shortly after his
death. At this time he was writing this work Levinas was actively
involved with the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue
Francaise, and the majority of his Talmudic studies originate in
lectures he presented there. His Talmudic commentaries include Quatre
lectures Talmudiques (1968), Du sacré au saint (1977), and L'au-delý
du verset (1982).
Levinas began to
develop his own philosophy in the late 1950's and early 60's as he
became more critical of Heidegger, prior phenomenologists and Western
thinking in general. He wished to go beyond the accepted and
ethically neutral conception of ontology, publishing Totalite et
Infini (Totality and Infinity 1961), his first monumental work which
awarded him a Doctorat d'Etat. Influenced by the work of Franz
Rosenweig and Martin Buber, Levinas attempted to address the
problematics of ontology by investigating and analyzing the
'face-to-face' relation with the Other. The Other is not known or
comprehended as such, but calls into question and challenges the
complacency of the self through desire, language, and the concern for
justice. Ethics for Levinas begins with the encounter with the Other
while maintaining that such a relation cannot be simply reduced to a
symmetrical relationship. It cannot be localized historically or
temporally. Toward the end of the 1960's Levinas would propose that
ethics is a calling into question of the "Same." Here, the
encounter with the Other has no empirical basis as an event or
non-event in linear time, nor is there a "self" that exists
a priori to the encounter which may choose to avoid the traumatic
experience of alterity. The encounter, a discovery of alterity in
itself, is an originary and essential moment through which the self
comes into being — it precedes freedom and determinism, action and
passivity. This encounter has always already taken place, and its
terms make up a central paradox in Continental philosophy.
In the same year as
the publishing of Totality and Infinity in 1961, Levinas was
appointed Professor of Philosophy at Poitiers, followed by an
appointment in 1967 at Paris-Nanterre. He moved to the Sorbonne,
Paris in 1973 and retired in 1976, although he continued to direct a
seminar until 1980. His second major book, Autrement qu'Etre ou
Au-Dela de l'Essence (Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence) was
published in 1974, and since that time more than a dozen books have
appeared, notably De Dieu qui vient a l'idee in 1982. In spite of his
critical position to Phenomenology, Levinas' translations and
writings had a major influence of French existentialism, most notably
the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Derrida also would install
Levinisian ethics at the heart of his Deconstructionist texts. It was
the influence of his colleague, Derrida, who pushed Levinas to write
Otherwise than Being (1998) in a language beyond the ontological
character of his earlier work, Totality and Infinity (1969). A new
set of terms are introduced which are largely or entirely absent from
Totalité et infini: proximity, approach, hostage, persecution,
expiation, substitution, illeity, enigma. Levinas even tempers the
use of the word, Other, in favour of "the neighbour" (le
prochain). One of the crucial aspects of Levinas's philosophical
endeavor is to interrogate the language in which his enquiry is
conducted, by disrupting the use of philosophical terminology with
unfamiliar usages of such terms and disallowing a rigid set of
propositions. His writing is reticent toward the privileging of
drawing sameness between distinct phenomena, characteristic of much
of Western thought. Even the definition of the Other could be
considered an application of the rhetoric of the same, hence, Levinas
went to great lengths to keep his texts flexible, changing and
resistant to reification, a violence to the fragile concept of the
alterity of the inassimilable Other.
Levinas died in
Paris, December 25, 1995.
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